[0] http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cf...

> “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” Pratt said. “As wonderful as AI is, AI systems are inevitably flawed… We’re not even close to Level 5. It’ll take many years and many more miles, in simulated and real world testing, to achieve the perfection required for level 5 autonomy.”

I can believe that, but I also disagree that we need to be there for it to be useful. Level 4 is enough for large scale deployments.

I think it's far more likely that there would be a three step process for this technology to be adopted: first it's early adopters and everyone else is like "whoa that's too far" (I think this has already happened), then people start to uneasily use it, and when it's good enough they realize "oh holy crap, the machine can drive while I watch Netflix! this is awesome" and then they'll use it constantly. Soon, it just blends into the background. Maybe it isn't 100% safe, but what is?

I don't think you'll get the truth out of focus groups, either. Try to hold a focus group on self driving car adoption and 99% of the people will tell you "only when it's perfect." Probably if you ask the same focus group if they text/eat/put on makeup and drive, 99% of them would tell you "absolutely not" when I'm sure that 100% of them do. I think that once a somewhat good enough assist gets into peoples hands, it won't stop.

This became painfully obvious with the article floating around where a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit sign. It's pretty clear that if a car is mistaking a red sign for a white sign, we have a very long time to go before the car can safely drive itself without a human observer to intervene when needed.

When it comes to automated driving, we need to keep our optimism in check and know that it can take decades before we have safe robotic taxis. They may become legal in countries with lower bars for safety before they are legal in the US.

The big problem, I think, will be when the drunks get into accidents because they will turn on autonomous driving, and don't get pulled over. Instead, they won't be sober enough to observe and intervene when the car screws up.

It's pretty clear that if a human can't even pay attention to a light directly pointed at them, we have a very long time to go before humans can safely drive cars without a computer to intervene when needed.

Of course, the road system is designed for humans' foibles, not computers' foibles, and computers will have to deal with that. But the bar is low.

Computers aren't really as consistent as you say, either. Obviously, a deterministic machine will produce the same outputs for the same inputs. But when your inputs are camera data from the real world, you'll never get the same input twice. For example, my car sometimes misreads or fails to read speed limit signs, but it'll usually read the exact same sign perfectly fine the next time I go past.

This is better for the environment, there is a lot of energy lost in a full stop for a stop sign that could be saved: less air pollution/CO2 to deal with.

I think you misread that article.

Someone built their own toy implementation of an CV sign recognizer. Then, with full access to the code, they reverse engineered visual distortions that could seem innocuous to humans but trip up their model.

It's not a real world issue as far as I'm aware (though obviously signs can be misread or missed, but not invisibly vandalized)

a) Humans can be fooled by vandalising a stop sign too. The difference here is that the change is imperceptible to humans... but does this matter?

b) A lot of self-driving work leans heavily on maps which will know to expect a stop sign.

That's what happens when the sign were made for humans. They should start putting QR codes under traffic signs, with the human sign as a fall back or as a second point of reference.

You wouldn't remove human sign identification from the algorithm, you just supplement it with the small QR code under the sign.

People can be dicks to each other in myriad ways, I don't find these arguments that you could trick self-driving cars super compelling.

Sure but is this because of capability or number of vehicles?

>at limited times,

Sure, because drivers don't want to work late at night.

>and presumably in limited weather conditions;

Why's that?

>and most importantly that there's still a human driver in the vehicle at all times.

Sure, but this isn't due to capability, but for regulatory reasons. As far as I know, the firefly vehicles (the cute little bubble ones) don't have steering wheels, and were in use 3 years ago. This argument doesn't make sense to me.

Because Phoenix has extremely low precipitation: http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/phoenix/arizona/united-...

Similarly, opinions from those heavily invested aren't convincing.

Are there people with credible experience, but without bias either way, that are giving projections on when it might be viable?

e.g. http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Driverless-car...

"I think that driving exposes fundamental issues in intelligence, fundamental issues in how the brain works. And we might be a very long way away.”

Having listened to Leonard speak, his skepticism seems to mostly be around how you deal with all the things like left hand turns in busy traffic, police waving people around an accident, etc. that happen on a daily basis.

Before automobiles it was normal for people to walk in the middle of the street, but we adapted (some would argue this was a bad thing ofc).

I don't think it's a prerequisite for autonomous systems to be the same as humans, the benefit is just too large for us to wait.